I was always disappointed that the Legendary runs for this mission were so much slower than the others because the TL has only 2 shots, and it was seemingly impossible to sprint to it and use it to clear the Courtyard quickly. Well, that’s no longer an issue!

Rushing the Target Locator is much, much harder than it looks in the run. It requires a lot of luck and skill. You have to be lucky enough for the enemies to miss a lot (Especially the stupid Phantom and the Ultra Elite. I hate them so much now.), and you have to be able to headshot all 4 Skirmishers before they rip you to shreds. After that, you have to hope and pray that the TL takes out all of the enemies without survivors. Ideally, you want to be out of the Courtyard in under a minute.

The rest of the mission is the same as ever with minor changes. I have to activate the AA Gun without the TL, for one. I die there about 50% of the time, but at least no significant amount time is lost without the TL. Inside the base, I had a very nice ascent with the Concussion Rifle, and Emile decided to be a little better than average at the end. For that reason, I decided to stick with this run. It’s now comparable to the Heroic record.

If you decide to challenge this, time can be saved mostly through better execution, some more shortcuts I opted not to use, and better luck at the end. Just remember that it will take a LOT of resets in the beginning to even reach the Target Locator. I don’t want to talk about it… >_>

Wow. Even I am baffled by the results here. I knew the previous record was beatable, but not by a whole 35 seconds. I completely blew my goal away! Well, here goes:

The initial fight at the beginning was almost flawless. I couldn’t ask for a better fight. Your main targets here are the elites, then the jackals. Take them out as quickly as possible, and you should be through in no time. For me, using both the sniper and the plasma pistol was the easiest and fastest way to kill every elite.

After that, the ghost portion went pretty well. A crate at the AA gun cost me a few seconds, but it was nothing serious.

Back at the base, my TL shot managed to take out every enemy, so getting to the hunters was a breeze. Speaking of the hunters, I managed to kill each of them with only 3 rockets (total of 6), saving considerable time and an extra rocket.

The hallway after the elevator was atrocious. I killed all the grunts, but I let the elite gain some distance, and it put several painful shots in me. As a result, I had to lose many seconds while trick jumping to prevent from killing myself…

The banshee section at the end was great, however. Somehow, the phantom dropped of the elites AND a suicide grunt (probably a turret grunt). Once I blew up the phantom and one or two banshees, everything was dead. Emile actually decided to be helpful for once!

End result is 7:06. I’m glad I got this done, because I’m not planning to do this level ever again anytime soon. If someone were to clean up my mistakes, this could easily go sub-7. Good luck. [edit by NOKYARD: It does go sub 7. Way sub 7. Stay tuned.]

For me, the beginning was the hardest part to route. I’ll try to explain what’s going on as well as I can. First, I run all the way to behind the trailer and back. This does 3 things: One, it spawns the skirmishers. Two, it causes Kat and the marines to push up straight to the barricades. Finally, it causes most of the enemies to bunch up behind Kat. This gives me a good opportunity for some decent multikills using the 3 grenades I have to use. Ideally, you want every enemy dead in front of you except for 2 elites. You can then backsmack them. After that, you have to play a waiting game with the jackals and elites on the ramp to melee them. This whole process can be as fast as 2 1/2 minutes or as slow as 4 minutes.

The Ghost section is pretty standard with a couple exceptions. At the AA Gun, I can’t use the TL to kill off the enemies as I hit the switch. So, I figured out that I can hide, wait for Kat to teleport into the area, and let her distract all of the enemies for me. It’s a lot safer than it looks; you just have to be patient. I also opt for the Gauss Warthog.

The Gauss Hog both provides a marine and strong firepower. The former proved to be absolutely useless at the base, but the latter was extremely helpful. I can use the powerful Gauss Cannon to let Kat kill everything for me, including the Hunters. It’s much easier and faster than trying to engage them in a melee battle.

Inside the base, the route is pretty standard. When I reach the Phantom at the top, however, I have to let Emile do all the work. As you may know, he can either decide to be helpful or miss every shot. Unfortunately for me, he decided to miss a lot. The elites also gave me some problems, but they’re usually worse; the marines took them out fairly quickly this time.

Final time is an impressive 15 minutes 3 seconds. Not bad considering I was hoping for sub-20 at first. With better optimization, I believe this could be brought down to 13:30 or lower. That’s not my job, however.

This is another Sword Base run by me, A BURNT W4FF13, and I used the same technique as my 5:34 Easy run, my 5:56 Normal run, and my 5:36 Normal run. I just improved so much between the courtyard fight and Farragut Station, that I broke my own record again.
~A BURNT W4FF13

If you saw Zenogen’s 5:39 run on Easy, then you might think that the Concussion Rifle is the fastest way to get this mission done. Well, I just made the Concussion Rifle obselete by massively improving other areas in the run that were a little slower in Zenogen’s run.
~A BURNT W4FF13

Rushed the locator to clear the courtyard, we forget about the two Wraiths.

Daze rushes for the AA Gun whilst myself and Finnster deal with taking down the Wraiths.

With the Wraiths down I (karima) assist Daze with the final two buttons, hitting the final switch.

Finnster is waiting around by the Wraiths doing nothing for many reasons but mainly to take advantage of the checkpoint teleportation. Once all three buttons have been hit, everyone will be teleported immediately back to the courtyard button.

We took advantage once again of the despawn glitch in Sword Base, clearing the mission in 5:21.

~Metal karima

I noticed something strange about this run. At 3:50 it looks like he switches the Concussion Rifle from his left hand to his right. I didn’t notice﻿ that when i recorded the run. If anyone has an explanation as to why this happens please leave a comment or reply with the forum link.

To celebrate Bungie Day (July 7th) 2012, RC Master decided to run through the whole of Reach on Legendary with 11 Skulls on (No Iron or Blind)! Game time is exactly 3 hours 33 minutes!

As he describes in the intro to the video, this is roughly equivalent to the difficulty you are required to play on for the LASO Weekly Challenges. The video comes in at just under 4 hours (including loading and cutscenes) and you can see him doing it live with a little picture-in-picture view of him – which he uses to provide commentary on the run as he does it.

There are a few deaths during the run (8 in all) but only one costs him any real time and most are just unlucky. None of the individual levels are as fast as the single-level LASO speed runs he and others have done – but these are all back-to-back on the day!

RC Master returns again to Sword Base on Legendary, cuts what little fat remains, and brings a new time of 7:41!

In his own words:

The biggest problem with ONI: Sword Base on Legendary compared to Heroic is that you only get 2 Target Locator shots for the entire mission. So even if you were to rush to the gate, you’d have to sacrifice either time or get lucky somewhere else.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be improved however, and I take a few tricks from the Heroic run to make this happen: better fighting in the courtyard, grabbing the Rockets on the way out rather than back in, being more aggressive in the parking lot and finally knowing where the enemies are coming from better in the broken part of Sword at the end.

Luckily on Legendary the Elite in the security hallway carries a Concussion Rifle, so I can use this to scale a pillar next to Jun and don’t have to deal with any enemies in the Atrium.